Wednesday Jul 22, 2015

Today, Oracle released a Press Release announcing the availability of Identity Management 11gR2 PS3 (Patchset 3). This update to the IDM 11gR2 solution brings forth some groundbreaking new capabilities for our customers to enable organizations to realize success in the areas of new digital business and unifying identities across applications. This greatly simplifies the on-boarding of new users, applications and services such as mobile and cloud.

Some of the new aspects of the PS3 update include a new "Business Friendly" user interface which provides a single console view of your provisioning, approval workflows, entitlement management, and more.

The update also introduces new capabilities around mobile security with the expansion of Oracle's Mobile Security offering to include Enterprise Mobility Management. This is achieved through the inclusion of Mobile Device Management capabilities as well as a consolidated policy management framework for simplified provisioning of devices, applications and access.

New materials that have been created to help you evaluate this new update include:

Stay tuned to the Oracle Identity Management product page for the latest information on how Oracle is able to solve today's business challenges, and stay on top of the latest information with Oracle's Twitter and Facebook pages.

Thursday Jul 16, 2015

We have all experienced it in one way or another. Either as an applications owner who has seen the scale of the issue grow over time, the line of business owners who have to rely upon what IT is able to deliver, the employees who work with the complex infrastructure and no clear path to the future, or worse, the customers who are potentially impacted by it all. What are we talking about here? Identity Fragmentation.

So years ago you stand up an HR system with it's own database repository and it's own user account system. You go to a secondary vendor to help streamline the provisioning and approval workflow for on-boarding and certifications. You leverage another vendor to assist with auditing of privileges and entitlements. All of this in support of the one application, and each additional layer you add creates it's own silo of identity information.

Now you want to stand up a payroll application. It too requires it's own repository for events, for user identities, workflow engines, and all the needs around auditing of privileges of entitlements. More and more layers must be built and very little of this can be re-purposed and re-used.

The challenged organizations get into is the repetitive efforts they are undertaking in setting up the duplicate components, having to re-create user accounts and the patchwork integration approach between applications which are not designed to share this credential information from the start. This leads to high costs to support, audit risks to the organization, and a challenge to respond to new requests for new applications and services such as Mobile and Cloud.

One of the biggest detractors in businesses moving to the cloud is the inability for customer's legacy applications being "cloud ready" in that they are not able to externalize user identities to the new cloud applications which can be detrimental to the success of the cloud migration.

Oracle has recently written a eBook (Establishing a Mobile Security Architecture) which has an entire chapter dedicated to the issues of Identity Fragmentation in today's enterprises as they related to mobility. Download this free eBook and take a look at Chapter 5, to learn more about Identity Fragmentation in the enterprise today, and to learn best practices for reducing your exposure and developing a more flexible architecture that scales for future on-prem, cloud or mobile applications.

Tuesday May 19, 2015

The Oracle Identity & Access Management team is announcing the General Availability of the latest update to our well recognized Identity Management 11gR2 PS3 (Patchset 3). This update to the 11gR2 solution brings forth some groundbreaking new capabilities for the Oracle offering and for our customers in the areas of a new "Business Friendly" user interface which greatly simplifies the tasks associated with provisioning and managing the tasks associated within today's more robust identity-driven enviroments.

The update also introduces new capabilities around mobile security with the expansion of Oracle's Mobile Security offering to include Enterprise Mobility Management. This is achieved through the inclussion of Mobile Device Management capabilities as well as a consolidated policy management framework for simplified provisioning of devices, applications and access.

Thursday May 07, 2015

Most organizations know from experience that Identity and Access
Management isn’t a project, but more of a multi-phase, multi-year
programme. Those who treat it as a single project, or even worse, as a
milestone deliverable within another project (i.e. delivering a new
business application) will be destined to fail. However, it is
typically individual projects that surface the need for IAM and are
forced to implement tactical fixes whilst the organization catches up
with a more strategic solution. It is easy to see the challenges that
individual projects face. No project sponsor wants to foot the bill
for an enterprise-wide IAM platform, just to deliver the subset of
capabilities they need. On the flipside, it is often difficult to get
sufficient buy-in at the board level to invest in a strategic IAM
platform. Implementing such a platform is often seen as a cost with
very little ROI.

However, that is no longer the case. The days of committing to a
lengthy and costly IAM programm with very little return are gone.
Let’s look at the evolution of IAM business cases in relation to IT
security as a whole.

Fear

Anyone who has worked in IT security for any length of time will be
more than familiar with this approach. Vendors used to sell IT
security-related products on fear. IT departments then used the same
approach with their investment boards. Pick the worst case scenario of
what would happen if you didn’t have a particular IT security product
(e.g. firewall) and convince the business that the scenario is highly
likely and therefore they absolutely must invest in the project. This
approach worked well in the early days when threats on the internet
weren’t as well understood and many organizations didn’t take a risk
management approach to handling IT security. As use of the internet
for business increased and the risks were better understood, the
approach of selling on fear started to wane, coupled with the fact
that this approach also had very little demonstrable ROI.

Enablement

As business started pushing back against throwing endless pots of
money at IT security with very little to show for it, the industry
needed to evolve. By now, use of the internet for business was
widespread and organizations were looking at how to take advantage of
this shift to online business. As part of this shift, businesses
realized that the foundation of any online business is security, and
in relation to that, identity. For a company looking to deploy, for
example, as eCommerce platform, or online banking, how could this
possibly be done unless it was secure? Also, how could online services
be provided to consumers unless you know who the consumer is. Once you
know their identity and they have proven ownership of their identity
(authenticated) you can provide then with the right services
(authorization) to meet their needs.

The approach of deploying IAM as a business enabler has been key to
obtaining investment from the business. We also know from our
everyday experience that there is real ROI associated with this
approach. Using the online channel, as end-users, we are transacting
more money online than ever before. For many people, the online
channel is the first, and preferred channel of engagement. Indeed, it
can also be a differentiator when you are looking for a company to
provide a service to you. For example, positive answers to questions
such as “Can I manage my accounts online?” can set one business apart
from its competitors.

For a lot of organizations, identity as an enabler is still the
business justification for investing in IAM. However, there are a
number of drivers within the industry today that are enabling IAM
business cases to evolve further.

User Experience

There are many organizations that already offer a strong online
presence and online catalog of services for their customers. However,
just having these online capabilities is no longer good enough. With
the shift of users from laptops and desktops to mobiles and tablets,
the expectations around user experience are driving IAM to a new level
and forcing organizations to evolve. Consumers have come to expect
slick and personalized user experiences whether they are an employee
or a customer. What is going to set an organization apart from its
competitors isn’t whether they have an online presence, but what the
experience for the end user is like. For example, does the company have a
mobile application? Is it easy to use? Can it provide me with all the
information and services that I need in an intuitive way? There are
so many mobile applications on the market today that users know what a
good application looks like. They are not prepared to spend hours
learning what they must do. If the app isn’t intuitive enough within a
couple of minutes, it is easy for the user to delete it and find a
different company that provides a better app and user experience.

IAM plays a crucial role within this evolution. We know from the
enablement business cases discussed above, that knowing the user is
key to providing them with services. However, looking at user
experience, IAM also provides a key set of services. Take these
examples:

Social login – Mobiles and tablets are great devices
for many things, but filling in long forms with lots of fields (e.g.
username, firstname, lastname, email etc) isn’t one of them. However,
user registration is one of the key elements to a mobile application.
If you can’t get your user up and running with your mobile app easily
and quickly, it will be deleted. Enabling customers to register from
their social network such as Facebook, Google+ etc is a great solution
to this. However, integrating with lots of social networks can be a
painful and time-consuming coding exercise for an application
developer. Fortunately, a good IAM platform will take that pain away
for you, turning social network integration into a configuration
rather than coding exercise.

Step-up authentication – So, now your user has
registered and logged into your app from a social network, now what?
Well, that level of trust may be good enough to access some basic
information but you aren’t going to let a user manage their bank
account (I hope) purely based on a social login. A good IAM platform
will enable you to understand the level of trust a user has at any
point in time and when necessary step-up their level of trust with an
additional challenge. This should be flexible but could include
options such as a issuing a challenge question or using a one-time
passcode.

Multi-channel Single Sign-on – In modern development,
the ‘constant beta’ and the focus is on rapid application development
and release cycles is very popular. Therefore, it is not always
necessary or desirable to implement all of the information and services
that are available on the website within the mobile app. This isn’t a
problem because you can always drop out from the application into a
web browser on a device, or even present web content within your
mobile application. However, you need to ensure you maintain the user
experience. Users have enjoyed SSO in the web channel for a long time
and they expect no less in the mobile channel. Therefore, flows like the
one below are unacceptable for users (and so they should be):

A good IAM platform will enable SSO not just within a single
channel, i.e. between multiple mobile applications, but also across
channel, e.g between a native app and a browser-based application so
that the user experience is maintained.

If you are looking for an IAM solution that can address all of the
above requirements as well as provide a single, integrated platform
for addressing all of your IAM needs, both internally and externally,
the Oracle IAM platform is a great option. Whether you are looking to
deploy it on-premise or within the cloud, Oracle can help you realize
your IAM strategy with its market-leading solutions.

To summarise, it’s not just about user experience. IAM helps many
organizations to meet their legal and regulatory requirements. However,
in today’s rapidly evolving IT world, we need to look at how IAM can
be used, not only as an enabler, but as a differentiator by delivering
improved user experience, thus taking it from a pure cost to the
business to one that has a demonstrable ROI.

About the Author

Paul Toal is a very passionate and capable IT
security consultant specialising in the field of Information Security.
He has worked in IT for over 20 years and built up a wide-ranging and
in-depth portfolio of knowledge and skills. Equally comfortable talking
to C-level execs or technical experts, Paul has worked in both pre-sales
and consulting delivery roles covering everything from writing business
cases, high-level requirements capturing and solution architecture,
through to delivery, training and post-sales support. In addition, he
has also been an integral part of designing the UK’s citizen Identity
Assurance framework, “Gov.UK Verify”, where he was one of the original
authors of the technical specification.

An upgrade process can be defined as the steps required for moving from a state where application leverage data managed within a DSEE directory service to a state where applications leverage data managed within an OUD directory service.

There
are multiple ways to achieve that goal:

1.
Export data and re-import data

2.
Leverage a synchronization tool

3.
Enable replication gateway

We have discussed the pro and cons for each one in this blog entry. For more information, you can dive into the details in the OUD’s Transition Guide. In this blog we will focus on how to leverage replication gateway for co-existence and upgrade from DSEE to OUD.Clearly OUD’s unique feature called “replication gateway” provides ability to keep DSEE and OUD directories in sync for more than just users entries as it also synchronize operational states which is something that synchronization tools have hard time to perform.Now let’s review the required step when you decide to go for upgrade via “replication gateway”.Your starting point is likely a configuration like this:

Fig 1: Original environmentThen, you will install an OUD instance; it should go as a straight forward operation as OUD can be installed in just a few minutes.

Fig 2: DSEE and OUD environmentsPlease refer to quick installation as documented is the installation guide. Then you start the upgrade. In most cases this can indeed be achieved through 3 steps as simple as 1-2-31/ Diagnose, migrate configuration and schemaThis is achieved via our ds2oud command, provided as part of OUD. This first step is important because it will analyze the features used by DSEE to identify those that could require specific attention because they could not be mapped automatically to an OUD equivalent. It will go through plug-ins, schema extensions, password policy used, encrypted attributes, index settings, global configuration parameters.

Fig3: Step 1: Diagnose & Migrate configuration and SchemaIt will then be used to diagnose the Directory Server data; this will identify schema differences that cannot be automatically migrated and will require manual adaptation. The ds2oud tool will then be used to migrate automatically the schema and configuration from DSEE to OUD. 2/ Export / Import data from DSEE to OUD

Fig4: Step 2: Export & Import data from DSEE to OUD

In this step data will be exported including metadata that will be transformed by the export to the OUD format. Then you will import that resulted LDIF file into OUD directory server.3/ Activate replication gateway

Fig5: Step 3: Setup Replication Gateway

Install and configure the replication gateway as described in the “Setting Up the Replication Gateway” documentation. This set up bidirectional replication between the two environments. From here any changes that took place on DSEE since you exported the data will be replicated to OUD and any change made on OUD will also be replicated to DSEE. Optionally you can specify that you want changes to be replicated only in one way-Final step is to redirect application from DSEE to OUD, this can be achieved by updating the load-balancer or proxy configuration. In this scenario you can fall back to DSEE by reverting the load-balancer/proxy configuration

Fig6: Switching applications from DSEE to OUD

Scenario described above cover general case, based on your configuration and existing services in DSEE further steps might be required to perform necessary adaptations. In such deployment, you will keep the two environments in synchronization while applications get validated on the new environment. You continue to upgrade more DSEE servers to OUD during the co-existence period, and ultimately the replication gateway will be removed and the DSEE servers will be de-provisioned. In summary, OUD is Oracle’s strategic, next-generation directory and the upgrade path for DSEE. Oracle encourages DSEE customers to upgrade to OUD to take advantage of the latest functionality in order to support on-premise, cloud, and mobile applications while benefiting from a lower TCO, improved user experience, and enhanced security.

We will continue to share upgrade best practices and case studies in future blogs, so please stay tuned. Additional references and details can be found here:Oracle Unified Directory documentation and transition guide, Oracle Directory Services blog, Sylvain Duloutre’s Weblog

About the Author

Etienne Remillon is Senior Principal Product Manager for Oracle Unified Directory and Directory Server Enterprise Edition products. Etienne has been in the X500 and LDAP Directory Services area for the past 20 years starting with Sun Microsystems.

Tuesday Mar 03, 2015

Our mobile IDs travel with us to work, back home, and on the road. Businesses are learning to cope.

by Lynne Sampson

Like most aspiring writers, I loved going to the library as a kid. I
had a library card as soon as I was old enough to sign my name—creased
and frayed from overuse, tucked inside my mom’s wallet. Mom and I handed
our cards to the librarian at each visit, and she looked up our names
in the library register and compared our signatures to the ones on our
cards.

This old-fashioned, analog ID system was around for a long time. It
was less than 10 years ago that my local library replaced paper cards
with plastic ones, with a photo ID and a magnetic stripe.

Today, analog IDs have gone the way of cursive script. Nearly all IDs
are digital. Since the rise of the internet, our banks, employers, and
apps ask us for a plethora of user names, passwords, and security
questions to prove that we are who we say we are.

This is a nuisance for absent-minded consumers who make frequent use
of the “Forgot My Password” button. But it’s an even bigger problem for
the companies and employers that we do business with.

“Mobile has become the platform of choice for everything from work to
vacationing,” said Naresh Persaud, senior director of security product
marketing at Oracle. “That adds a layer of complexity to identity
management that most organizations haven’t had to deal with before.”

Consider the way we work. “Many companies have salespeople who travel
constantly. They use their tablets all the time, and they want to log
into their applications, track their deals, check and assign new leads.
They like the mobile experience because it’s familiar and easy to
navigate,” Persaud said.

What’s not so easy is provisioning all those mobile devices for a
corporate network—especially as more and more of us use our personal
devices for work.

Adding further complexity to the mix, a growing volume of marketing,
selling, and hiring is done via social channels like Facebook, Twitter,
and LinkedIn. “Many of us need social tools integrated into our mobile
identities,” Persaud continued. For example, one B2B company tracks new
leads coming in from marketing campaigns and then checks the prospect’s
ID on LinkedIn. If the sales manager finds a rep who is already part of
the prospect’s LinkedIn network, he’ll assign the lead to that rep,
using existing relationships to gain an introduction.

And it’s not just customers or employees who companies must think
about. “At some companies, like online music providers, the product
itself is digital.” This is becoming more common as the “sharing
economy” (driven by apps like Uber and Airbnb) takes flight. This means
keeping track of which user has access to which products and services.
“We’ve entered a world of ‘digital abundance,’ where our mobile ID
becomes the currency of entitlement,” Persaud said.

What does it take to manage our mobile identities? How do companies
give employees and customers access to all their apps, systems, and
products from a multitude of devices?

Companies need to establish policies, technologies, and best practices to manage and audit the use of mobile devices. Mobile should be an integral part of your company’s larger security and identity strategy.

“You need an integrated platform that provisions access to data and
systems, manages the identities of people, and authenticates devices,”
Persaud explained. “Integrated” is the key ingredient when it comes to
managing mobile identities. Using separate security solutions for data,
devices, and people makes it more complicated for customers and
employees to get access to the tools they need. Plus, a single identity
for each user—no matter which device they’re on—can help you maximize
conversion and revenue.

“A great example of this is Beachbody,” Persaud said. Beachbody
provides home fitness products and creates a community for members
trying to reach their physical fitness goals. “Instead of physical
locations, Beachbody delivers products and services via the web and
mobile devices.” To connect with millions of customers and thousands of
fitness coaches, Beachbody needed to digitize identity and do it
securely across multiple channels. “Mobile was perhaps the most
important part of their identity management project,” Persaud added,
“because it’s become the platform of choice for consumers.”

Our mobile identities are somewhat akin to DNA—unique, evolving, and
hugely complicated. Someday, our DNA might actually be the key that we
use to access all technology and services, from pension checks to
downloaded music. Until that happens, though, companies need to work
with mobile identities. That means working with an integrated security suite that includes mobile as a consideration equal to data and people.

Friday Feb 27, 2015

Today, just as organizations are starting to understand the
first wave of the mobile revolution, there are now numerous demands being
placed on IT to support the second wave of mobility as a new generation of devices and
applications are coming online to take advantage of these new capabilities in
today’s corporate environments.

"Establishing a Mobile Security Architecture" provides a deeper understanding of not only the fundamentals,
but also the complex issues related to mobile security in today’s corporate
mobility environment. If you maintain the role of a mobility planner, security
architect, CISO, security director, IT director, operations manager or just
simply want to better understand the best application of technologies for each area of mobility within your organization and how to reduce risk, then download this free copy of "Establishing a Mobile Security Architecture".

Some of the areas covered in this eBook:

A look at the changing mobile and business
requirements

Deep dive in the technologies used to secure the
mobile platform today

Thursday Feb 19, 2015

The digital revolution is creating abundance in almost every industry—turning spare bedrooms into hotel rooms, low-occupancy commuter vehicles into taxi services, and free time into freelance time. This abundance is delivered on mobile devices. One industry, however, is using mobile apps to help its customers do less.

The utility industry is using smartphones to help its customers conserve energy in their daily lives by tapping into smart meters.

In Belgium, smartphones and tablets provided a ubiquitous platform to deploy energy-saving applications. So Electrabel, Belgium’s largest energy company, launched a campaign to provide smart boxes, smart thermostats, and smart plugs that would allow homeowners to view power usage and control appliances from their mobile devices. A great idea! But how to make it all secure?

Providing digital access to all of the appliances in someone’s home requires rethinking security: Which users in the household would be allowed to control the devices? How can the utility company detect fraud and take corrective action? With all of these devices online, how can the utility company manage access by administrators? How can it enable consumers with simple services like password reset and profile changes? Not surprisingly, 40 percent of the attacks on the energy and utilities sector have come in the form of web application attacks.

To keep its smart meter and mobile services from going to
the dogs, Electrabel used Oracle’s
security solutions. You can read about Electrabel’s implementation in Oracle Magazine, along with another interesting use case at Vodafone Group.

Electrabel was so confident in its solution that it launched
a puppy-heavy
national ad campaign to encourage participation. Here are more puppies. Need more?
Here.

Stories like Electrabel’s are only the beginning. Cisco
estimates that by 2020, there will be 50 billion devices on the planet and,
according to the report, 69 percent of the value will be people-centric
communication, which makes the Electrabel story that much more important—because
the interaction between devices and people will rely on similar security processes.

Some estimates show that the smart
home market will double by 2018. Like Electrabel, the industry must do the
work to keep criminals from hacking these applications and stealing personal
data—or even worse, using these services as an entry point to cause potentially
catastrophic failures like the attacks against SCADA systems.

Building security into new services is critical for the
utilities industry—just as it will be for every business embarking on a digital
transformation.

Wednesday Feb 18, 2015

The
greatest threat of a data breach –intentional or not - continues to be
from employees, contractors and partners – people you are supposed to be
able to trust. On February 12th, Oracle presented to ISACA members on the critical nature of establishing policies, technology and best practices to manage, monitor and
audit the use of mobile devices as part of a larger Identity Management
strategy.

Our presenter was Mark Wilcox, who is a Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle. Leveraging his 20 years of experience in the computing industry and the Identity and Access space, Mark delivered a very focused session on best practices and industry guidance that would benefit any organization evaluating their mobile strategy. Please click on the following link to replay the event from February 12th, 2015.

For more information on ISACA, and how they can support you on a student, professional or academic level, please visit them on their website at www.isaca.org or directly on their Membership Page.

Wednesday Feb 04, 2015

Security is a key business consideration to protect customer
data and transactions, business secrets and intellectual property (IP) as well
as ensure compliance with regulations. On
the other hand, better user experience is critical as it attracts more
customers with more transactions or enables employees to be more productive.

But how can you provide better user experience while at the
same time enhance security?

Let’s take a look at a real-world example. A large bank used
to provide mobile online banking through their browser applications. However,
their customer rating of mobile online banking experience was well below the
bank’s competitors. As mobile banking is becoming the most important channel of
customer interaction, in order to better compete, the bank decided to provide a
native mobile application for online banking.

However, mobile banking has inherently higher risk than
traditional channels. For example, the device can be easily lost or stolen, and
the password can be easily obtained through shoulder surfing. Given these
challenges, stronger security is required for mobile access. But due to user
experience considerations, the bank cannot require customers to register their
devices or require customers to always use one-time-password (OTP) or other
types of multi-factor-authentication (MFA), which may turn customers away.

Even
the typical web username and password based login is inconvenient for mobile access.

To ensure tight security while providing excellent user
experience, the bank implemented a solution with the following capabilities:

1.Initial setup process

a.When the customer first downloads and installs
the native mobile banking application on a mobile device, the user registers
the application with the backend server through user name and password authentication.

b.As this is the first time the device with the
application is trying to connect to the backend, a one-time-password through
email or SMS is sent to the user to further validate the user.

c.Once the user is validated upon application
registration, the device fingerprint is taken automatically to register the
device for the user.

d.The user can then set up a 4- to 6-digit pin for
their future online banking access.

2.Online banking experience after initial setup

a.The user launches the mobile app on the mobile
device with a pin.

b.To look up an account balance, no further user
authentication is needed if the device fingerprint is validated (automatically in
the background).

c.Banking transactions such as money transfers
require a pin-based authentication without the need for username-password
authentication.

3.Risk control and adaptive authentication.
Although the banking experience above is a typical user experience for majority
of customers most of the time, the solution is monitoring and analyzing risk
based on real-time context such as device, location, transaction amount,
frequency, etc., based on defined policies and access patterns. If the risk is
deemed high, the user may be required to further authenticate using OTP or
Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) or in some cases the user may be denied
access altogether.

With the launch of native-application-based online banking
and the excellent user experience provided, the bank’s new mobile online
banking service gained wide adoption and the bank’s service rating increased
substantially.

The key to balancing security with user experience is an
intelligent Access Management solution that understands real-time risk and
context and accordingly takes adaptive actions. For example, we all know that
passwords are not safe enough. However, it is not practical to require all
consumers or even all employees to use MFA all the time due to experience and
adoption issues. Security and user experience can be balanced through an
intelligent security system.

Users appreciate the fact that they can continue
to use passwords as they always have and will only be challenged further with MFA when risk is high.

In future blogs, we will talk about how Oracle Access
Management can intelligently provide context-aware, content-aware and
risk-aware access to simplify user experience, so please stay tuned.

About the Author

Forest Yin is the Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Access Management and Directory Services product lines. Forest has been in the identity management industry for almost 15 years starting with Netegrity.

The seemingly endless stream of highly visible security breaches and public disclosure of classified information, WikiLeaks website, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and the latest incidents at Home Depot, USPS and Target, conspicuously exposed the existing problems with privileged user management.

Privileged users perform sensitive activities that involve extended access to strategic corporate and federal (or state) assets. In most organizations, privileged accounts are not clearly defined, and different individuals often share some of these accounts. When privileged accounts are not tightly managed, they present a high security risk for the organization.
Because privileged accounts are not necessarily tied to individual end users, detecting inappropriate access to privileged accounts and determining which individuals in a team of administrators participated in unauthorized activities is extremely challenging.

The Problem:

How to provide individual accountability when using shared accounts?

How to provide an audit trail to detect inappropriate privileged usage?

The Solution:

Let's see how Oracle's Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) can solve these compliance requirements and connect the dots to provide individual accountability through an audit trail. A routine audit check for a security auditor could start with an inspection of recent system activities using the reporting tools accessible through the OPAM console.
In our case he selects a one week time frame for a particular system or range of systems and searches if specific accounts have been used on these systems. The search result (Figure 1 below) identifies two sessions occurred.

Note: Further details about sessions and OPAM Session Management can be found in blog entry: “Introducing OPAM Session Management” and the OPAM OTN homepage

Figure 1: OPAM checkout history and session transcripts

In the search result (Figure 1) we see even though users "arun" and "olaf" used the same (shared) account ("admin") in an overlapping period of time an individual session transcript per user was generated. So there's no question who did what and when. A quick glance into the session transcripts doesn't reveal any suspicious user activities.

Note: A session transcript, a fully searchable textual representation of a session, is created when sessions are initiated through OPAM's Session Manager.

Trying to further narrow down his search results the auditor is filtering for key words like "ftp,scp". One session matches the search criteria (Figure 2).

Figure 2: OPAM checkout history search results

The session transcript reveals “olaf” was uploading a database file to a “jumpbox” using “scp”.
When the pattern search reveals a noticeable activity, the auditor can decide to further proceed and track “olaf’s” activities across all systems. He narrows down the potential list of sessions for “olaf” to the time frame close to “olaf’s” Linux session.

One session on the Windows based “jumpbox” is found (Figure 3) that matches the search for the pattern “FTP” in the windows session event index.

Figure 3: OPAM checkout history and windows sessions event index

Using the windows session event index, which allows searching for a specific event, the auditor can jump directly to this event and replay the session from this point in time versus a replay from the very beginning of the recording.
The video recording plays in standard HTML5 browsers (without need for any additional software downloads). You can jump to a specific video section (the event index), or use the fast-forward or backwards button to quickly navigate within the video.

Our follow up blogs will cover how to setup and use OPAM within a deployment to create the audit trail details described above. Additionally we’ll talk about how to take preventive actions to restrict privileged user access.

Tuesday Jan 27, 2015

One of the major challenges that companies face in adopting a cloud
computing platform is the secure provisioning of services in the cloud.
Oracle API Gateway (OAG) 11g can be a very powerful tool in this sense,
since it focuses on service protection, with authentication mechanisms,
message encryption, and security/policy functionalities.

Marcelo Parisi recently drafted an article that details how one can create a cloud-based OAG
infrastructure with high-availability and scalability support. Both
high-availability and scalability operations are covered and, for the purpose of the article, Marcelo uses virtual machine (VM) and storage concepts, along with OAG
and Oracle Traffic Director (OTD).

Monday Jan 26, 2015

Modern Business. Modern Cloud.
Is Your PaaS Delivering the Agility Your Users Demand?

Join Oracle at the keynote as we kick off the online forum with IDC analyst Robert Mahowald. Learn how to rapidly build, deploy, manage, and secure rich applications and enable business collaboration and innovation using an integrated cloud platform built on the industry’s #1 Database and Application Server.

Following the keynote, stay for highly engaging content specifically designed for:

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Be sure to join the Middleware Cloud Platform Sessions and learn how to Extend Your Identity Management Services to the Cloud

As organizations consume an increasing number of cloud services and apps, identity management becomes fragmented. Organizations have inconsistent access policies and lose visibility into who has access to what. To avoid these risks and costs, they are increasingly adopting a strategy of extending enterprise identity services to the cloud. This session explores how customers are using Oracle Identity Management to deliver a unified identity management solution that gives users access to all their data from any device while providing an intelligent centralized view into user access rights.

Review the full agenda for more information. Experts will be available for online chat to answer your technical questions.

Thursday Jan 22, 2015

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is the foundation of Identity Management. LDAP directories are designed to store identity and policy information and provide runtime access to that information. Oracle’s Directory Server Enterprise Edition (DSEE) is the most widely deployed directory in the industry with thousands of production deployments. Some customer deployments include hundreds of millions of entries and even over a billion entries for a single deployment.

However, as business and technology evolve, a modern directory not only needs to be scalable for large scale directory consolidation but also needs to be able to virtualize identity from multiple data sources. In addition, a directory not only has to provide extremely high search performance but also write performance. A modern directory has to support on-premise applications and deployments as well as cloud applications and deployments. To address these new requirements, Oracle has introduced Oracle Unified Directory (OUD), the next generation, all-in-one directory for LDAP storage, synchronization, and virtualization.

OUD is Oracle’s strategic directory and the upgrade path for DSEE. Oracle strongly encourages DSEE customers to upgrade to OUD to take advantage of the following benefits:

OUD is a converged directory service providing storage, synchronization, and virtualization capabilities. Full convergence is in progress and the convergence provides richer functionality while simplifying deployment and ongoing maintenance.

OUD performance and scalability far exceed DSEE’s. For example, OUD 11gR2 can deliver more than 5 times DSEE’s write performance and more than 3 times DSEE’s search performance.

OUD is designed to address current and future on-premise, mobile, and cloud needs. OUD enables enterprises to consolidate identity management for applications, databases, and servers. It can synchronize and virtualize identities from on-premise and cloud data sources to enable on-premise and cloud applications to work side by side. Its performance can handle dynamic mobile data and its scalability can support the requirements of extremely large social networks.

Free DSEE-to-OUD upgrade license. Existing DSEE customers are offered a one-to-one free upgrade license to OUD. In other words, no license cost for upgrading to OUD.

DSEE 11gR1 Premier Support is extended while DSEE 5.2 and 6.3 are in Sustaining Support.

DSEE 5.2 and DSEE 6.3 are in infinite Sustaining Support, i.e., no new fixes will be created. These customers should upgrade to OUD (or to the latest DSEE 11gR1) to ensure up-to-date security and take advantage of more functionality and better quality.

In order to ease customer migration, Oracle has extended DSEE 11gR1 Premier Support from June 2015 to December 2016 to provide customers with more time for planning and implementation.

Upgrade is technically straightforward and easy

OUD is designed to be fully compatible with DSEE, so any applications working with DSEE should work with OUD.

Co-existence is provided between OUD and DSEE in that OUD can run just like a DSEE with bi-directional replication capabilities. This co-existence enables zero down-time and gradual migration for large scale deployments.

OUD is proven with over a hundred production deployments. Most of them are upgrade from DSEE 5.2, 6.3 or 11gR1 while some are a replacement for Novell, OpenLDAP, etc. Some have up to hundreds of millions of users (consumers) while others have tens of thousands of employees.

In summary, OUD is Oracle’s strategic, next-generation directory and the upgrade path for DSEE. Oracle encourages DSEE customers to upgrade to OUD to take advantage of the latest functionality in order to support on-premise, cloud, and mobile applications while benefiting from a lower TCO, improved user experience, and enhanced security.

We will continue to share upgrade best practices and case studies in future blogs, so please stay tuned.

About the Author

Forest Yin is the Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Access Management and Directory Services product lines. Forest has been in the identity management industry for almost 15 years starting with Netegrity.

Wednesday Jan 21, 2015

In my last post on OAuth, I covered a couple of important considerations regarding granularity of OAuth scopes. My recommendation was to look at scopes not only from the app development perspective, but also consider administrative knowledge and life cycle burden that might be inadvertently created. I discussed that overloading with too many fine-grained scopes will place a burden on the user, creating confusion or complicating policy administration. Its best to define few scopes protecting the high level service, adding few additional scopes to secure access based on minimally required read and write permissions, and only then evaluate if additional scopes are required.

In this blog, I'm going to take a closer look at the difference between a scope grant and authorization policy.

People ask this question all the time - can a client app possessing a token with a given scope access any application resource or only resources authorized by user's consent represented by the granted scope? It turns out people mistake scope grants for security policies designed to protect the application. The answer depends on how people model application's security policies vs modeling scope grants.

Its important to distinguish between a scope grant authorized by a person who happens to be the "Access Approver" for his/her resources and data, and application security policies that govern what a user in session can do within the application. There are two things going on here:

Second, the scope grant must convey the resource owner's approval for application to use the underlying resource. Hence, the scope grant typically represents context to be evaluated by the authorization policy.

For example, the following authorization policy may be protecting access to the Salary attribute when displaying user's detail page in an HR application (expressed in pseudo language):

(Session.User has Role "HR Clerk" or "Self") and (Session.token has UserSalaryScope")

This policy ensures the user must have a role "HR Clerk" and have the end user's approval to see salary data (or be the user who's record is being viewed).

We can see clear delineation between authorization policies that have user-centric context, and scopes that represent user-centric context. The latter is meant to be used in authorization policies, rather than represent the authorization policy itself. This is the way I suggest people work with OAuth scopes for enterprise applications - first define the functional security model represented by authorization policies, then define scopes to be used as context attributes in authorization policies.

Even though its possible to model application's authorization policies to align with scopes 1:1, doing so would be a wrong thing to do, really painting an application into a corner from the security policy and delegation of administration perspectives. Such shortcut would work only for applications with trivial authorization policies or for 100% claims-based applications, but not for enterprise applications with comprehensive policy and administration needs. Sooner or later (usually sooner), scope overuse will manifest itself in inability to adequately administer enterprise application's security.

In the next blog, we will look at other scope-related topics:

Scope changes. The Authorization Server is free to grant a different set of scopes than what a client requests. This can happen because of policy, user consent, or just versioning issues.

Scope risk. The Authorization Server might issue different tokens with different lifespans based on the scope requested

Implicit scopes. Some scopes may be “implicit” where the policy dictates whether user, or a client on user’s behalf is authorized to do something – resulting in “automatic” consent with no actual consent dialo

Privileged scopes. The Authorization Server may inject special scopes not requested by clients, by granted non-the less based on the contextual state of the client.

About the Author

Vadim Lander joined Oracle’s Identity & Access Management team in 2009. He advises Oracle on key security technology trends, sets the technical strategy for the IAM Enterprise and Cloud product lines, and works with various Oracle teams on the architecture and implementation of the IAM stack.
Previously, Vadim was CTO for the Security BU at CA delivering the architectural blueprints for engineering CA’s next-generation solutions. Vadim joined CA in 2004 with its acquisition of Netegrity, where he was CTO after holding a number of successive growth positions in engineering.Vadim holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in Boston.

Wednesday Jan 14, 2015

As business and citizen services, entertainment and social life all become digitized and virtualized, passwords emerge as a key piece of data to be used for stealing information and online resources. In the past, this was a possibility and an occasional occurrence but in recent years the Apple Celebrity Photo breach [1], JPMorgan [2] and Pharmaceutical Company [3] data breaches have demonstrated the increasing scale and range of password-based threats to businesses. It is interesting to observe that each of these three breaches demonstrates a *different aspect* of the "password problem": ability to guess or reset passwords, password re-use and subsequent discovery from a website with weak security controls, and last, phishing attacks targeted at executives or administrators.

Pundits, bloggers, security gurus and journalists have all declared passwords "dead".
The Motorola login pill [4], the heartbeat monitor [5] and device hardware [6] are just a few of the many
claimants jostling for a tryout as password replacements. So are we finally at a point where passwords
will no longer be used to login to your employer or at your online medical portal?

To get some perspective, it helps to step back and review the overall context in which passwords are used
and the different parties involved. For the business or service provider, passwords are a *scalable* and *low-cost* way to control
access to services.
For the user, there is a familiarity and ease with the *ceremony* of password use and the overall
*user-experience*. Finally, both businesses and users share a conceptual and visual understanding of
login page, user registration, forgotten password service and so on.

A successful new model for authentication must address these issues. While business costs and administrative overhead are important,
a predictable and easily learnt user-experience is critical and for obvious reasons. The best authentication
model is useless if customers or employees find it difficult to use. This is the key reason why it has proven so difficult to
transition away from passwords - even after many years of effort - Bill Gates [7] had called for their removal almost a decade ago!

As we are all aware, one significant technological change in the past five years has been the worldwide availability of phones -
smart phones (now widespread in the developed world) and wireless feature phones (in the developing world).
And perhaps herein lies the future of authentication. We all know how to use a phone and its services, and we are being trained
to download and install applications. Phone features are constantly being improved and a foundation for innovative ways to authenticate.

The popularity of a phone-based "authenticator app" which provides TOTP (Time-Based One-Time Passwords) to augment existing password systems
is a great example. The technology is well-known and was standardized in RFC 6238 [8] by IETF (the folks who helped define most of the protocols for the internet such as HTTP and SMTP). As an open standard, it has been reviewed by leading experts in the
field and so we can have some reasonable expectations of its robustness and quality.

Many websites and vendors now provide such an
app: for example, the Oracle Mobile Authenticator can be installed on Android [9] devices or an iPhone [10] and works in concert with the Oracle Access Manager.
Once a user has installed the authenticator app, they are guided through a registration process which connects the app to their
online account. Notice that a password is still required for this step. The app generates six digit (pseudo) random numbers, in a sequence
specific to the user, typically changing to a new number every 30 seconds.

At subsequent logons, in addition to their password, the user is prompted to enter the current random number displayed by the app.
Even if the password has been compromised and is known to an attacker, the attacker will be unable to login to the user account.

Clearly this "password+otp" model has its limitations. An attacker could "phish" both the password and the code and within
a few seconds login into the user account. A more sophisticated attacker could extract information about the random number generator
from the app or the target website and simulate the random number sequence used by the app.

Nevertheless, this model protects against a common attack - where the password was guessed or discovered at a previous
time. The level of security sought by a business should be based on the value of the resource and types of attacks against which
it is trying to protect itself. The goal is to *impose costs* on an anticipated class of attacks, versus achieving some security ideal.
The password+otp user-experience remains a familiar one, though individuals do have to learn the extra step of viewing the app on their phones to retrieve the
current number, and entering into a login screen.

Passwords aren't dead but they are going to be less important in the future. They will provide only one component of user authentication, though the
conceptual and visual model of the login page will be retained. There are going to be lots of experiments, some profound and some silly (authentication
tattoos anyone?), that companies and researchers will bring forward. The recent iPhone 6 [11] fingerprint scanner and Keychain integration is an intriguing sample:
how can it be integrated with the familiar login experience and might it become a universal feature of smart phones in the future?

About the Author

Prateek Mishra is Technical Director at the Identity Management Division, Oracle. His group participates in standards and open source
activities, including OAuth and OpenAz. He is best known for his pioneering role in conceptualizing and creating the SAML identity standard.

“Thank you for your purchase of Mojo! Your credit card has been billed $19.95.”

As I leaned back and reviewed my morning email on my iPad, I was surprised to see a receipt for a purchase of something called Mojo. However, it quickly dawned on me exactly what it was and how this had happened.

You see, for a few weeks my son had been playing a free-to-play game on his iPad. In this game, there was a virtual currency called Mojo. He had been asking for me to spend real money to buy some of this virtual currency and I had spent an equal amount of time denying this request. So when the receipt landed in my inbox, I knew exactly what it was and who did it. What I didn’t know was how he had managed to make the purchase.

My iTunes password had lower and upper characters, a special character, no dictionary words, and a number. I wasn’t using it on any other site and hadn’t even given it to my wife.

What I had done was type it on my iPad that morning before I left for work, allowing each character of the password to echo on the screen as I typed it.

Apparently, a properly motivated 9-year-old (at the time) can easily watch these characters echo over your shoulder and enter them later on their own device.

What if this was an Enterprise Password?

Many companies still use login/password to access corporate VPNs and business applications.

Imagine that you work for one of these companies and visit a conference or trade show and that you have decided check a file share, CRM application, or wiki using your mobile device.

You pull out your device, unlock it, and launch the application. Usually you’ve entered at least two layers of passwords by this point (perhaps using your fingerprint or swiping rather than entering a PIN to unlock your device).

While the device unlock is important, it requires that someone actually have your device to make it useful. The second sequence, where you connect to your corporate network (or cloud provider) is much more interesting. This is where you go from giving someone access to 32GB of data on your phone to countless terabytes stored in your enterprise.

If your organization hasn’t put into place one-time tokens or two-factor authentication, you’ve potentially given a motivated attacker an easy way to get access to your network. It’s much easier to watch your screen echo your password than it ever was to watch you touch-type your password.

Where some organizations get things exceptionally wrong is by enforcing even more frequent policies on authentication when coming from a mobile device. The idea is that because devices can more easily lost or stolen, it’s ideal to request users re-authenticate frequently to prove that they are still in control of the device.

This particularly cruel and unusual policy not only degrades user experience and encourages people to choose easier-to-type passwords, but also subjects these passwords to more frequent exposure.

Fortunately there are better security policies and better software to make those policies work well.

What Actually Works?

The easiest solution to this problem is to use the device itself as an authentication factor. This means that a hacker needs both my password and the device in order to login. This can be as simple as device fingerprinting and as complicated as leveraging digital certificates.

An even better solution is to move away from using any passwords in the first place, leveraging PKI and other established technology to handle the authentication between the device and the service, while using emerging technology like containerization to ensure that only appropriate applications on the device can leverage that session.

With employees bringing their own devices to work in BYOD programs, it’s very important to take an approach that focuses on applications, rather than devices. Over-hardening security at the device-level (e.g. even just to play Angry Birds), rather than just stepping up authentication when it is really needed (e.g. to view customer data), over-exposes credentials and gives users incentives to work around the inconvenience of security.

What about the Young Hacker?

With no shortage of hidden pride (and considering his promising future black hat career working with the LizardSquad and CryptoWall teams), I let my son know that he wasn’t allowed to do this sort of thing anymore.

Within a few days he proceeded to get my next few passwords, but “only used them to get free apps”. At this point I gave up.

About the Author

Clayton Donley is the Vice President of Product Management for Oracle’s Identity Management and Mobile Security products.

Tuesday Jan 06, 2015

Just released - the latest issue of Oracle Magazine is focused on security and features two great case studies you will want to share with your customers. These two stories highlight how companies are reducing risk and at the same time mastering digital identity. "Businesses need identity management systems to provide a single point of access and control while reducing costs and improving operational efficiency. Learn how two organizations are turning to the Oracle Identity Management solution to enable growth and business transformation."( Phillip Gill, Oracle Mag 2015)

A United Workforce VodafoneAt Vodafone Group, the world’s second-largest telecommunications company, the first step in adapting to the mobile, social, and cloud evolution was to unite corporate identity and access management.

Empowering CustomersElectrabelElectrabel GDF Suez, the largest supplier of electricity and gas in Belgium, is counting on identity management to help it reach out to millions of its residential customers to reduce energy consumption.

“Lava and TNT is covering the entire spawn, dad! Can you fix it?”

I help my 12-year-old son run a Minecraft server for his friends, as well
as random strangers (500+ at last count). Players point their Minecraft
game at his server and work collaboratively (or so we hope) with others
to build things, chat, and otherwise have fun.

In the span of two years, there’s been a lot of learning when it comes to
managing a system where the bulk of the users have pre-teen or early
teen levels of maturity.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Apparently on a server loaded with pre-teen users, there’s actually a LOT that go wrong…frequently.

In addition to my Saturday mornings of cleaning up lava and TNT (CoreProtect is your friend), I’ve needed to unban dozens of legitimate users, revoke privileges from griefers
who have decided to destroy parts of the world, and kill off entire
populations of zombies, creepers, and other creatures that were placed
with the intent to DDoS the server with lag.

While on the surface these all seem to be different problems, they all ultimately come down to the wrong people having too much access and a lack of visibility into who has access to do what.

Who can you Trust?

To
be clear, this access generally started with one person (my son), but
as a server grew, this power got distributed to other helpers. These
helpers get roles like Admin, Mod, Builder, etc… that give them a range of powers.

Minecraft
servers support a notion of privilege systems. These systems allow you
to very granularly define what each of these groups have access to do.
For example, the Builder role might have access to make broad changes to the world by placing blocks in bulk using the WorldEdit, while users in the Mod
role may have access to kick a player off the server or ban them.
Figuring out which role grants access to what privileges involves
manually sifting through pages of roles and permissions in a text file.
Users can also have permissions that override the ones defined in their
roles or have their roles and permissions restricted to only certain
worlds or regions within the server.

If you’ve ever visited a multi-player Minecraft server, you’ll notice that
the chat logs are inundated with kids asking others for all kinds of
elevated access. If you’ll only make them a Mod,
they’ll be your friend for life, bring all their friends to your
server, build great things, and help you keep everything running
smoothly. They’re friends with so-and-so, who runs the biggest Minecraft server you can imagine, and she will get so-and-so to send people to your server as well.

This
is all bulls***. You’re much better off giving your password to the guy
on the phone claiming to be from IT or clicking a phishing link.

Apparently,
when kids hear this kind of thing, they start giving everyone crazy
levels of access without considering the consequences. At one point when
things were particularly out of control on the server, I audited user
permissions and found that approximately half the active users had some
level of privileged access. There was actually a network effect of kids
giving it to other kids.

To
make things worse, plugins all have their own permissions. Some of
these permissions are quite powerful and allow players to change large
parts of the world. It’s not always obvious when such privileges have
been granted until they are granted to the wrong people — who then take
advantage of it.

Who is this Really?

The
Minecraft game itself costs money (~$27). Many families buy a single
copy that gets shared by everyone in the family. Some kids even share
their software with other friends that may not have bought a copy. All
of this is done by sharing a single Minecraft login/password.

This
means that even if you’ve got a great contributor who is building great
things and interacting with a level of maturity well beyond their
years…five minutes later a completely different kid could be accessing
your server with the exact same account…and this kid could be a
disaster!

Not only
that, but nearly everyone who does something bad to your sever will
claim that it was not really them that did it at all…but their terrible
brother/sister/friend/etc… Hackers are frequently invoked. Those of you
with multiple kids (or dysfunctional teams) know exactly what I’m
talking about.

It’s like asking who left up the toilet seat or ate the last cookie — maybe a ghost?

Regardless of who did it, the damage is done and you’re left cleaning up the mess.

Enterprise Software is Different, Right?

Your typical enterprise is running hundreds or thousands of applications.
Each of these systems also has roles and permissions that determine who
gets access to which data or functions. Ideally, the security on these
systems is being managed in a way that is different from the way my son
runs his Minecraft server.

IT and the business need to understand some fundamental things about the users of mission critical systems:

Who has access to which systems, functionality, and data?

How is this access requested and approved?

Who is certifying that this access continues to be appropriate?

What users have toxic permission combinations (e.g. create/pay their own POs)?

Who has highly privileged access (e.g. super-user) and what are they doing with it?

This is where Identity Governance comes into play.

Identity
Governance solutions connect to various systems in the enterprise to
manage accounts, roles, and entitlements for users.

When an employee joins the company, they get a standard set of privileges
for their role in the enterprise. This might be things like sending
email or submitting expense reports. Additional privileges can be easily
requested and approved as appropriate by the business and IT. Finally,
when an employee leaves the company, their accounts and privileges are
centrally revoked across all of these systems.

Lack of proper controls open enterprise applications to various insider
threats. Additionally, over-privileged accounts are a goldmine for
hackers that have already gained basic access via common attacks like
phishing and malware.

Avoiding Lava and TNT

Hooking up an Identity Governance solution to a Minecraft server is a bit overkill — though don’t think I didn’t consider it.

Instead, I simply went user-by-user, role-by-role to limit everyone’s access to
the bare minimum. We then selected a few users that would be given the
ability to do more privileged things, but didn’t allow these users to
further delegate their privileges. Additional plugins were added that
allow for tracking and rollback if these permissions were abused
(similar to privileged session recording).

Cleaning things up with 500 users in a half-dozen roles on a single, relatively simple system took several hours.

Scaling
this manual process up to tens of thousands of users, thousands of
roles, and hundreds of systems without the benefit of automation would
have been completely impossible without cutting corners and reducing
overall security.

That said, in the case of the Minecraft server, this significantly improved
the stability of the server and eliminated some of the large-scale
griefing that was taking place.

About the Author

Clayton Donley is the Vice President of Product Management for Oracle’s Identity Management and Mobile Security products.

Wednesday Dec 17, 2014

Visit the The Oracle Learning Library to access free Identity and Access Management video content for a multitude of audiences including Security Compliance Auditors, Identity Adminstrators, Security Administrators, as well as Java Architects and Developers.

Wednesday Dec 10, 2014

The OAuth standard has proven itself to be a very effective in managing distributed Web authorization by providing client applications a secure, delegated access to server resources on behalf of a Resource Owner. A large number of public Internet web sites have standardized on OAuth for service-to-service authorization, the standard has gained traction in securing commercial SaaS/PaaS/IaaS services cloud, and is being adopted by enterprises interested in externalizing internal web services.

Here at Oracle we're using OAuth2 to secure access to Web Services exposed by Oracle Public Cloud services. While the standard itself is relatively straightforward, there are a couple of areas that each implementation must address on its own. The purpose of this blog is to look at one such area we have to advise application developers on - how to deal with OAuth scopes. We will assume the reader is familiar with the standard OAuth terminology.

Figuring out what scopes to expose is a responsibility of an application developer, and it may be confusing at first:

Do I expose a single scope protecting the entire service, or do I expose scopes to protect fine-grained business functionality of my application?

Do I break up my service into many smaller services with one scope each, or do I build multi-functional service with multiple fine-grained scopes?

How do I balance the needs of my clients to request specific capabilities and the needs of my application owners to manage appropriate policies?

Lets take a closer look at scopes, and see what it means to request scopes that will be granted by the Authorization Server and placed into the Access Token.

An OAuth scope X is an indication by a client that it wants to access the Resource Server to perform X or access something on the service that is related to X. For example, the client may request a claim EMAIL_SERVICE to access the email service, or it may request claim DELETE_INBOX if it desires to delete inbox entries.

The developer of the email service needs to think about what scopes should be exposed in a way that lets services support different types of clients by allowing proper authorization delegation. In the previous example, the “EMAIL_SERVICE” scope is generic and might not be that useful because it grants too much authority. If the email service breaks this into scopes such as “EMAIL_READ”, “EMAIL_POST”, “EMAIL_MOVE”, and “EMAIL_DELETE”, the core functionality of the email service is expressed as scopes. This becomes useful to allow clients to use minimal authority to access the user’s mailbox without requiring full access.

As mentioned previously the purpose of OAuth is to authorize access to a service. Hence some Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) will be tasked with securing access to the Resource Server must be able to determine from the Access Token's authorized scopes whether or not access should be allowed. Once the token is issued to a client, client's access rights will be bound by scopes encapsulated by the Access Token for as long as the Access Token is valid.

The big question is where to draw the line between defining very granular scopes representing the right to invoke functional "capabilities" exposed by physical service implementations, and creating broad scopes representing the right to invoke the actual physical services.

One important perspective on how to answer this question is to look at the problem from the perspective of the Resource Owner - specifically what authorization decisions need to be made to authorize requested scopes, how often these decisions needs to be made, and what needs to be known in order to make such decisions. The lifecycle of managing such authorization decisions should be straightforward – otherwise the policies will be incomplete, out of date, or overly permissive.

From the Resource Owner perspective there are two important considerations:

Who owns the data - end user or the target service

Who gets to specify the authorization policy - end user or application owner

The difference in considerations is important since it determines who gets to authorize the client's request for specific scopes - end user who's data will be requested by the client, or the business/security admin configuring the client and granting it specific privileges. Lets take a close look at each consideration:

End users authorizing request for scopes

If the Resource Server is tasked with providing access to end user's data (such as the case with consumer sites or user-centric apps such as email), the end user is the ultimate authorization authority for deciding whether or not requested scopes should be granted.

In this case the purpose of a scope is to let the end user know what the client is trying to do with end user's data (ex: Requesting access to one's pictures or emails, requesting access to one's mobile GPS data, etc.). Then when the Access Token is granted, the approved scopes are "burned" into the token. Presenting this Access Token to the Resource Server conveys the fact the end user has approved client application's request to access his/her data.

We can see that scopes represent client's intent to access user's data, and can be modeled based on the number of user's data categories the Resource Server wants to protect from "super user" access.

This requirement to secure access to end-user's data is the primary reason for the 3-legged OAuth interaction where the end user (data owner) is responsible for providing consent to operations requested by the client. Here, the end user is familiar with, and wants to protect access to his/her data, so modeling scopes based on user's data categories (or collection of categories) makes sense. This model is often used by user-centric cloud services such as mail, photos, storage, documents, etc.

Business admins authorizing request for scopes:

There are numerous commercial/enterprise services where the Resource Server is consumed not by the end user directly, but by partners who build clients to consume, expose, or extend application functionality.

In this case the purpose of scopes is to represent authorization permissions as granted by an administrative process responsible for registering clients. For example, a real estate site is exposing listings, where unpaid clients have access to listings without addresses, while paid clients have access to addresses. Here, “Address” would be a scope, and it would be the service administrator configuring clients and granting them allowed scopes based on the level of service a client has paid for.

We can see that scopes represent fine-grained capabilities the Resource Server is charging for, using administrators (or automated sign up processes) to decide the authorization policy.

Looking at both scenarios, we can conclude that having too many scopes will create a burden on some user to try and understand/manage the meaning of scopes.

In the case of user-centric scopes, the end user is expected to understand the meaning of the data managed on his behalf.

In the case of business admins, they're expected to understand business rules (or in the case of automated client registration, have the ability to collect required service-level agreements).

The more scopes are exposed by a Resource Server, the greater the burden on a user (end user or administrator) to understand the exact meaning.

Hence, the overarching goal of application developers is to make their users capable of understanding the underlying authorization process, and this requires looking at scopes not only from the application development perspective but also from "administrative" knowledge and life cycle burden a developer might inadvertently create - some human being will have to be responsible for and trained in understanding the meaning of scopes.

Ultimately, the application developer has to think about what scope means in the context of “their” application, including how much delegation (to an end user or policy) should be exposed. There will be as many scopes as the developer wants to expose to a user who is expected to understand their meaning – this could be an end user of social/mobile app clients accessing his/her data, or a security policy admin for enterprise/commercial applications.

Overloading with too many fine-grained scopes will place a burden on the user, creating confusion or complicating policy administration. Its best to define few scopes protecting the high level service, adding few additional scopes to secure access based on read/write operations, and only then take a closer look at whether or not any additional scopes are required.

This is it for the first installment on OAuth scopes. In the next blog, we will look at other scope-related topics:

Scope affinity. Can a client with a given scope access any resource or only the resource associated with the authorizing (and/or owning) user?

Scope changes. The Authorization Server is free to grant a different set of scopes than what a client requests. This can happen because of policy, user consent, or just versioning issues.

Scope risk. The Authorization Server might issue different tokens with different lifespans based on the scope requested.

Implicit scopes. Some scopes may be “implicit” where the policy dictates whether user, or a client on user’s behalf is authorized to do something – resulting in “automatic” consent with no actual consent dialog.

Privileged scopes. The Authorization Server may inject special scopes not requested by clients, by granted non-the less based on the contextual state of the client.

About the Author

Vadim Lander joined Oracle’s Identity & Access Management team in 2009. He advises Oracle on key security technology trends, sets the technical strategy for the IAM Enterprise and Cloud product lines, and works with various Oracle teams on the architecture and implementation of the IAM stack.
Previously, Vadim was CTO for the Security BU at CA delivering the architectural blueprints for engineering CA’s next-generation solutions. Vadim joined CA in 2004 with its acquisition of Netegrity, where he was CTO after holding a number of successive growth positions in engineering.Vadim holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in Boston.

Wednesday Dec 03, 2014

Most organizations know from experience that Identity and Access Management isn’t a project, but more of a multi-phase, multi-year programme. Those who treat it as a single project, or even worse, as a milestone deliverable within another project (i.e. delivering a new business application) will be destined to fail. However, it is typically individual projects that surface the need for IAM and are forced to implement tactical fixes whilst the organization catches up with a more strategic solution. It is easy to see the challenges that individual projects face. No project sponsor wants to foot the bill for an enterprise-wide IAM platform, just to deliver the subset of capabilities they need. On the flipside, it is often difficult to get sufficient buy-in at the board level to invest in a strategic IAM platform. Implementing such a platform is often seen as a cost with very little ROI.

However, that is no longer the case. The days of committing to a lengthy and costly IAM programm with very little return are gone. Let’s look at the evolution of IAM business cases in relation to IT security as a whole.

Fear

Anyone who has worked in IT security for any length of time will be more than familiar with this approach. Vendors used to sell IT security-related products on fear. IT departments then used the same approach with their investment boards. Pick the worst case scenario of what would happen if you didn’t have a particular IT security product (e.g. firewall) and convince the business that the scenario is highly likely and therefore they absolutely must invest in the project. This approach worked well in the early days when threats on the internet weren’t as well understood and many organizations didn’t take a risk management approach to handling IT security. As use of the internet for business increased and the risks were better understood, the approach of selling on fear started to wane, coupled with the fact that this approach also had very little demonstrable ROI.

Enablement

As business started pushing back against throwing endless pots of money at IT security with very little to show for it, the industry needed to evolve. By now, use of the internet for business was widespread and organizations were looking at how to take advantage of this shift to online business. As part of this shift, businesses realized that the foundation of any online business is security, and in relation to that, identity. For a company looking to deploy, for example, as eCommerce platform, or online banking, how could this possibly be done unless it was secure? Also, how could online services be provided to consumers unless you know who the consumer is. Once you know their identity and they have proven ownership of their identity (authenticated) you can provide then with the right services (authorization) to meet their needs.

The approach of deploying IAM as a business enabler has been key to obtaining investment from the business. We also know from our everyday experience that there is real ROI associated with this approach. Using the online channel, as end-users, we are transacting more money online than ever before. For many people, the online channel is the first, and preferred channel of engagement. Indeed, it can also be a differentiator when you are looking for a company to provide a service to you. For example, positive answers to questions such as “Can I manage my accounts online?” can set one business apart from its competitors.

For a lot of organizations, identity as an enabler is still the business justification for investing in IAM. However, there are a number of drivers within the industry today that are enabling IAM business cases to evolve further.

User Experience

There are many organizations that already offer a strong online presence and online catalog of services for their customers. However, just having these online capabilities is no longer good enough. With the shift of users from laptops and desktops to mobiles and tablets, the expectations around user experience are driving IAM to a new level and forcing organizations to evolve. Consumers have come to expect slick and personalized user experiences whether they are an employee or a customer. What is going to set an organization apart from its competitors isn’t whether they have an online presence, but what the experience for the end user is like. For example, does the company have a mobile application? Is it easy to use? Can it provide me with all the information and services that I need in an intuitive way? There are so many mobile applications on the market today that users know what a good application looks like. They are not prepared to spend hours learning what they must do. If the app isn’t intuitive enough within a couple of minutes, it is easy for the user to delete it and find a different company that provides a better app and user experience.

IAM plays a crucial role within this evolution. We know from the enablement business cases discussed above, that knowing the user is key to providing them with services. However, looking at user experience, IAM also provides a key set of services. Take these examples:

Social login – Mobiles and tablets are great devices for many things, but filling in long forms with lots of fields (e.g. username, firstname, lastname, email etc) isn’t one of them. However, user registration is one of the key elements to a mobile application. If you can’t get your user up and running with your mobile app easily and quickly, it will be deleted. Enabling customers to register from their social network such as Facebook, Google+ etc is a great solution to this. However, integrating with lots of social networks can be a painful and time-consuming coding exercise for an application developer. Fortunately, a good IAM platform will take that pain away for you, turning social network integration into a configuration rather than coding exercise.

Step-up authentication – So, now your user has registered and logged into your app from a social network, now what? Well, that level of trust may be good enough to access some basic information but you aren’t going to let a user manage their bank account (I hope) purely based on a social login. A good IAM platform will enable you to understand the level of trust a user has at any point in time and when necessary step-up their level of trust with an additional challenge. This should be flexible but could include options such as a issuing a challenge question or using a one-time passcode.

Multi-channel Single Sign-on – In modern development, the ‘constant beta’ and the focus is on rapid application development and release cycles is very popular. Therefore, it is not always necessary or desirable to implement all of the information and services that are available on the website within the mobile app. This isn’t a problem because you can always drop out from the application into a web browser on a device, or even present web content within your mobile application. However, you need to ensure you maintain the user experience. Users have enjoyed SSO in the web channel for a long time and they expect no less in the mobile channel. Therefore, flows like the one below are unacceptable for users (and so they should be):

A good IAM platform will enable SSO not just within a single channel, i.e. between multiple mobile applications, but also across channel, e.g between a native app and a browser-based application so that the user experience is maintained.

If you are looking for an IAM solution that can address all of the above requirements as well as provide a single, integrated platform for addressing all of your IAM needs, both internally and externally, the Oracle IAM platform is a great option. Whether you are looking to deploy it on-premise or within the cloud, Oracle can help you realize your IAM strategy with its market-leading solutions.

To summarise, it’s not just about user experience. IAM helps many organizations to meet their legal and regulatory requirements. However, in today’s rapidly evolving IT world, we need to look at how IAM can be used, not only as an enabler, but as a differentiator by delivering improved user experience, thus taking it from a pure cost to the business to one that has a demonstrable ROI.

About the Author

Paul Toal is a very passionate and capable IT security consultant specialising in the field of Information Security. He has worked in IT for over 20 years and built up a wide-ranging and in-depth portfolio of knowledge and skills. Equally comfortable talking to C-level execs or technical experts, Paul has worked in both pre-sales and consulting delivery roles covering everything from writing business cases, high-level requirements capturing and solution architecture, through to delivery, training and post-sales support. In addition, he has also been an integral part of designing the UK’s citizen Identity Assurance framework, “Gov.UK Verify”, where he was one of the original authors of the technical specification.

Abstract: As organizations consume an increasing number of mobile and cloud apps, identity management becomes fragmented. Organizations have inconsistent access policies and lose visibility into who has access to what. To avoid these risks and costs, they are increasingly adopting a strategy of extending enterprise identity services to the cloud. This presentation explores how organizations are using Identity Management to give users access to all their data from any device while providing an intelligent centralized view into user access rights across mobile, cloud and enterprise environments. See how Oracle Identity Management can securely accelerate your adoption of mobile and cloud applications.

Identity Governance
Given the state of our economy these days, with high number of data breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information assets, it is no wonder this is one of the biggest threats an organization is concerned with these days. Ensuring proper vetted access and visibility into highly privileged accounts and entitlements is critical to ensuring a sound security practice.

Thursday Nov 20, 2014

Today, just as organizations are starting to understand the
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The Oracle Mobile Security Primer will provide a deeper understanding of not only the fundamentals,
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Some of the areas covered in this eBook:

A look at the changing mobile and business
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Deep dive in the technologies used to secure the
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Containerization and application management

The role Identity Management plays on the mobile
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The broader view of securing the mobile stack

Registration will allow Oracle to provide notification to
you upon its availability in both eBook and printed form by McGraw-Hill.

"By 2015, over 80% of handsets in mature markets will be smart phones.” - Gartner Research

While mobile devices have evolved to better suit the needs of consumers they've also traded away security to ensure usability. These trade-offs increasingly contribute to security risks when such devices connect to the enterprise resources.

Watch the webinar replay as experts from Avancer and Oracle discuss Mobility in the Enterprise and the implications that BYOD have on the security postures of the organization along with the steps that can be taken to reduce risk.